Vita Soul Wilmering

Whirling through the solar system is a physics-defying planet named Insomnia where time stands still. When an elderly artist is diagnosed with incurable cancer, his doctor suggests a visit to this celestial body as a way of stemming the progression of the disease. With the help of his filmmaker daughter, the artist prepares for a momentous interplanetary journey.

Spiegl tells a universal story of fleeing, through an organic mix of road movie, opera, and re-enacted memories. Yitschak Spiegl was the foster daughter of a Czech mother, and was living as a woman when in 1988 he fled Communist Czechoslovakia. Fragments of his personal history emerge as he visits places in Austria with filmmaker Vita Soul Wilmering where he spent time as a refugee. Chance meetings with people on the street unintentionally form a recurring thread that links up themes of exclusion and pigeonholing, which shape the painful undertone of Spiegl’s life story.

An open air cinema on the dry bottom of a lake in the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina opens a window to a silent past. A fisherman shares his associative reflections on found footage films shot by tourists traveling to the former Yugoslavia in the sixties and seventies. Via poetic, hesitant and sometimes hilarious remarks on both the people and the animals appearing on the screen, he creates a touching insight into a complex past.